Something I love about writing a novel set in another era is that I get to mentally return to a simpler time. This doesn’t mean a perfect time, but only that the time was less complex in nature.
Let’s take, for example, social media. Do you ever wonder what we did before social media? Oh, yes . . . now I remember. We wrote letters. We picked up the phone. We met up. We conveyed our thoughts and ideas and opinions via spoken words rather than through a medium that allows everyone in the world (or within your world) to know what you think, how you feel, and what you had to eat.
Don’t get me wrong—social media has its benefits. For example, a few years back, I “found” an old schoolmate on Facebook. “Hey,” he wrote in a text, “do you know whatever happened to So-and-So?” I answered back, “Yes! We’re friends here. Let me connect you.” Pretty soon we realized that if we took everyone he had connected with and everyone I had connected with on this social platform, we could form a private page for our old school chums—those we had literally grown up with. Pretty soon, we had gone from two to over 70 including a few of our teachers.
And, of course, there is the joy of TV binging. This is a line out of Beth Bettencourt, which is the title of the book I recently signed a contract for, and set in 1962.
She sat up a little straighter, ran a fingertip along my jawline. “You sighed.”
“A man can’t sigh?”
“Well, sure but—”
“Beth,” I said, nudging her back to her original position, “watch the show.”
She snuggled in again, this time her arm encircling my waist. “Do you like The Virginian?”
“Do you?”
“Are you kidding? I could watch it all day.”
I kissed the top of her head, inhaling the sweet scent of her shampoo, the fragrance of flowers. “It doesn’t come on all day,” I mumbled against her hair.
“But if it did,” she said. “I could. All day, one episode after the other.”
“Wouldn’t that be something? To be able to just sit and watch one episode of a TV show, one right after the other?”
Our words gave in to the show. We went silent until the next commercial—one that changed the screen from color to black and white.
So, yeah. There’s that.
But here’s what I don’t like about our modern technological wonders—the idea that we cannot go a minute without a phone in our hands. Oh, now . . . I’m guilty too! But I do draw the line from time to time. For example (and I really don’t care if you have this), it’s not just that our phones are clasped tightly in our hands, but now we have also encircled them to our wrists. Many of us have either our phones or our watches dinging constantly, interrupting our face-to-face social interactions or just our time alone. This is not something that took place in 1962.
Let me tell you a story. Recently I went out of town to an event and had the first evening to myself. Near the hotel was an Olive Garden, so I walked over for dinner. Alone. The table where I sat was angled—there was another table to my left which I had a clear view of and a booth to my right, also a clear view. At the table sat a young couple who were either dating or they were a young married couple out for the evening. Their hands were tucked into the other’s as they stared at each other with pure adoration. When he spoke, her eyes twinkled. When she spoke, his laughter skipped across the room. They were enthralled by the very presence of the one they’d come with.
At the booth sat an older couple. Their hands clasped cell phones, their noses buried in the screens. Not once during the entire meal did they speak a word to each other. Not once. Not even so much as a “this is delicious . . . would you like to try it?” They did, indeed, put their phones down on the table beside their plates once their meals were served, but even then, their eyes stayed locked on the screens.
I left with a desire to stop at the table on my way out and say, “Good for you” and at the booth to say, “Shame on you.”
My mother used to talk about “the good ole days,” which meant back in the war-torn, Depression-ladened 1940s. “After supper,” she’d tell me, “we used to go outside and sit on the front porch in the rockers. We talked and laughed . . . and then neighbors would come by, and they’d sit and talk, too. We didn’t get on the phone; we didn’t watch TV. We talked.”
How sad she would be today to see that when we gather at our tables (including holiday tables), we hold onto our phones, we take pictures of our food rather than sharing it, and we look down and not up. We will hold, I fear, few memories of conversations . . . of laughter . . . and of neighbors dropping by for a nightly chat. And we won’t, I’m sure, remember what email we were reading, what video we were watching, or what text we were answering.
(Beth Bettencourt will release in Spring 2026 through Kregel Publishing. Photos from Pixabay.)
Eva, I concur. I feel that Social Media takes away from many things in our life— like time. However, when I do unplug, I have a panic feeling of being behind in the world. It’s certainly a conundrum.